Elwin Ha

Hong Kong Creative Director at Kazoo Joined over 6 years ago

  • 1 story
  • 10 comments
  • 60 upvotes
  • Posted to Proposal: Making Design Tokens A Single Source of Truth for Figma tool., Apr 06, 2020

    Good read :)!

    What I find interesting is that CAD software like Fusion360 and SolidWorks already has variables and equations, something I utilize quite often when doing both industrial and UI design and development.

    0 points
  • Posted to In Figma, What is your approach to designing for different platforms, Android, iOS, Web?, Jan 29, 2020

    If the project is completely multi-platform, I design for web first (it's the most device agnostic platform), and make sure the design accounts for:

    1. Different device aspect ratios
    2. Pixel density and resolutions
    3. Colour reproduction on difference devices and print media (PANTONE > RGB and P3).

    It's pretty complex to design a fully responsive project in Figma as they lack the tools to do so, so I add in supplementary documentation (sometimes as a comment) or in the brand guidelines.

    I also have a master "frame" for any particular screen of an app, and have other reference child frames for other screen sizes as needed to show how the layout would work in various scenarios and edge-cases.

    Hope that helps!

    0 points
  • Posted to A couple weeks to rework a design system. Where to start?, Apr 06, 2019

    As Nelson has said, it really depends on what you're currently using.

    For my team, we were using Sketch and Marvel to handle our design system and developer-handoff. One of the issues we faced was as we were expanding our typography system to other languages, our Sketch library was getting massive because of the way it handles font and colour (Sketch's style system for fonts is very rigid and 1 style = 1 font + colour + alignment, so adding a colour, or horizontal/vertical alignment to our headers makes our styles exponentially larger).

    Figma has a more robust system where font styles only retain the point-size, tracking, and leading. Alignment and colour can be manually overridden, and the lack of 3rd party plugins makes it more accessible to our marketing, development, and C-team to export assets, as they do not require the app and can access the system via their web browser. However, Figma does not have Anima, so I'm limited to what I can do with respect to truly responsive components.

    With Sketch I had 162 font styles for 1 language (9 colours * 6 text sizes * 3 alignments = 162); with Figma I have 7.

    In the future, I would like to adapt my company's design system to a code library with better documentation... but my time is limited right now unfortunately.

    tldr my design system in Sketch has 162 font styles, Figma has 7, but Sketch has better plugins to deal with responsive components.

    1 point
  • Posted to Captain Marvel's website is a technological wonder, Feb 11, 2019

    Hahaha, they would get bonus points if the page source code itself was set in 90s-like syntax style

    2 points
  • Posted to What is the correct approach for gathering feedback from different departments at the same time?, in reply to David Melendez , Feb 08, 2019

    Is there a reason why they avoid it? In my experience (I use Marvel but it's similar to InVision and Zeplin) I send every stakeholder a shared link to designs, then they can easily access via their browser and then comment on it.

    However, there were a few instances where feedback on spreadsheets were warranted because I need to extract data programmatically using Python or something related so I usually use Google Spreadsheets for that since they have an API for it.

    1 point
  • Posted to Any website that curates helpful books for designers?, Nov 12, 2018

    Maybe this isn't exactly what you're looking for, but MIT Press has a curated list of books on Design Thinking (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/design-thinking-design-theory)

    One of the books (Frame Innovation) is authored by one of my former professors, Kees Dorst, on how to approach solving complex and highly networked problems; I highly recommend it :)

    1 point
  • Posted to What is your favorite prototyping tool?, in reply to brian sheridan , Nov 02, 2018

    Yep! Illustrator is much better at vector manipulation than Sketch in my opinion, so I tend to do most icon and illustrations on there, and then export to Sketch afterwards to put into my design library where I can apply overrides and stuff to it.

    1 point
  • Posted to What is your favorite prototyping tool?, Nov 01, 2018

    My workflow mainly consists of Sketch/Marvel/Principle for digital, and Illustrator/InDesign/Photoshop for print. Additionally, I also use a projector to visualize what large prints would look like (like booths or large billboards), to overcome size limitations of monitors.

    But my favourite app to use is Cinema4D and other 3D apps whenever clients or work warrants a need for it, or if I'm doing physical product prototyping.

    1 point
  • Posted to What rucksack / bag do you use?, in reply to Bryan Maniotakis , Oct 18, 2018

    Agreed. I got the MemoryTech Nile Rucksack, and the bag is like a black hole; it has so much room and just wraps around everything I throw in it due to its design and material. I took it with me to climb Mount Fuji last August, and I was able to clip my flashlights on the shoulder straps (sort of like Iron Man haha), a 3L water pouch, all my clothes, and snacks :)

    0 points
  • Posted to Sans Forgetica : a font designed to help you remember your study notes, Oct 05, 2018

    Comic Sans seems to have a similar effect for me :)

    3 points
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